Now more than ever, it is important for B2B companies to have some kind of marketing strategy. Gone are the days of fielding an outside sales team to be competitive. The most successful orgs use integrated marketing strategies to drive leads and support the efforts of reps as they work to close more business than the competition. Digital marketing is what makes this possible.
How Important is a Website for Business Growth? Download this Infographic.
For the purposes of this article, let’s define digital marketing as any marketing effort that uses an electronic device or the internet. B2B orgs leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and their websites to connect with current and prospective customers. Where traditional marketing practices have historically been inefficient and hard to analyze for B2B marketers, digital shines. Digital gives B2B orgs the ability to target their audience with meaningful messaging and creates a framework for attribution
Here are the top three ways B2B orgs benefit from deploying digital marketing strategies:
RAISES AWARENESS
Marketing has always been about connecting with the target audience in the right place and at the right time. For B2Bs that means meeting prospects where they are already spending time: on the internet.
Whether its providing valuable information or resources on your website, sharing industry news on social media or leveraging online PR channels to secure earned coverage, digital marketing provides a way for B2B organizations to emerge from the shadows and raise awareness about who they are, what they do and why they matter.
It’s a long-term play that requires investment and patience, but digital enables B2B companies to raise brand awareness. This exposes a potentially large audience to the brand, familiarizing them with it in a way that they can recall it, recommend it or think about it later on in their time of need.
Digital marketing enables organizations to make strategic marketing decisions based on data.
GENERATES LEADS
In case you haven’t figured it out, popping into lobbies with brochures or spending hour upon hour dialing for dollars doesn’t work as well as it once did to generate leads. Digital marketing is now the best way to find an engage prospects so that your sales team can have personalized conversations with them.
Digital marketing tactics give B2B marketers a way to attract and convert complete strangers into people who have shown tangible interest in their company’s product or service. Some examples of digital marketing lead generators are blog posts, webcasts, white papers, and online video. By deploying and gating different types of content — crafted to match personas and buying stages — marketers can save salespeople from pounding the pavement for leads. Instead, they can spend more of their valuable time interacting with interested prospects and generating revenue for the company.
NURTURES BUSINESS
If generating warm leads is a top priority for B2B marketers and salespeople, then a close second is converting those leads into customers. While lead generation is certainly important, investing in generating more leads without building an effective lead management process is simply, well, foolish. Enter digital lead nurturing.
Lead nurturing is the purposeful process of engaging a defined target group by providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey, positioning your company as the best (and safest) choice to enable them to achieve their objectives.
An digital lead nurturing workflow can move a prospects through a sales process to the point where they actively learn about your company, demo your product or service, request a quote and ultimately become a customer. Lead nurturing utilizes both marketing and sales tactics to increase the predictability and velocity of revenue growth. By combining content, email marketing, digital strategy tools and marketing automation, B2B orgs can create repeatable methods for moving prospects through the funnel and into their revenue streams.
